We've known for a while that One Punch Man director Chikara Sakurai and producer Yu Suzuki were working together to bring us a Shenmue anime, and now we've got our first look at the Cruncyroll/Adult Swim production in action - and it looks pretty decent!

With an understandable focus on the action of the series rather than its more ponderous moments where star Ryo Hazuki feeds a kitten or goes for a long walk at night across town so he can play Hang-On, it's a high energy look at the world of Shenmue as established in the first three games. Indeed, there are several memorable moments such as Ryo's encounter with Lan Di as well as his arrival in Hong Kong, as seen at the start of Shenmue 2.

Will this anime give fans the closure they've been waiting so long for? After the much-anticipated Shenmue 3 also ended on a cliffhanger, there's been murmurings the story might wrap in a medium outside of video games - but to be honest, I'm happy for Ryo to be in pursuit of his father's murderer for as long as possible if it means we get some more sweet Shenmue action.

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Following a year of Epic Games Store exclusivity on PC, Shenmue 3 will be making its way to Steam on 19th November.

Shenmue 3 initially launched at the tail-end of 2019 - a mere 19 years after the previous instalment in Yu Suzuki's legendary series - finally giving extremely patient fans the very long-awaited next chapter in the ongoing saga of Ryo Hazuki and his quest to avenge the murder of his father, one that began on Sega's Dreamcast all the way back in 1999.

Epic's move to snaffle up Shenmue 3 as an exclusive for its PC store, with a bit of help from publisher Deep Silver, proved even more controversial than usual, given the project had been crowdfunded to the record-breaking tune of $7,179,510 from 81,087 backers, many of who were promised and expecting to receive a Steam key on release day.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.

Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now!

This week we'd usually have been arguing about - I'm sorry I mean debating - all the big announcements from E3. True, we had Sony's PlayStation 5 reveal yesterday and it was very exciting, and true, we have a bonanza of PC game events to look forward to this weekend, but it's not quite the same is it? Covid-19 means the world's gaming industry couldn't squash into downtown LA to see Microsoft and Sony reveal their fancy new machines, and the big publishers show their games for them.

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Hello and welcome to the second of our Clash of Fans write-ups. This week we'll be getting together in pairs (virtually) and forcing each other to play a beloved game. Then we'll chat about what we made of it all. Next up is Old School RuneScape and Shenmue!

Matt: I have to admit, a good portion of my time allocated to this feature was spent signing up to RuneScape. It was frequently baffling - I somehow had an account already associated with Jagex which needed resetting several times, my usual handle (and my back up, and the back up to that) were already taken, and upon trying to buy membership, it wouldn't let me type in any credit card details.

It was similar to the only other time I tried to play an MMO - an evening wasted trying to get my head around Square Enix's account system to play Final Fantasy 14 in its infancy, forcing me to give up on what I hear is one of the best games in recent years - and a reminder of why I tend to stick to console games. There's only so many captcha screens I can take!

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Shenmue 3's first DLC has just been announced - and it's called Battle Rally.

Releasing 21st January, the DLC will offer "fresh gaming activities in a race unlike any other, as contestants engage in head to head battles whilst racing their way through the course." For the first time in the series, players will be able to take on the role of a different protagonist - including Wuying Ren, and Ryo's sparring partner Wei Zhen. And Ryo himself, of course.

Should this tickle your fancy, you'll be able to pick it up for 6.49 through the Sony Store or Epic Game Store - unless you bought the Complete DLC Collection, in which case the DLC will become available automatically.

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Editor's note: Shenmue's a game that can do funny things to people. First time round I was obsessed with AM2's detail-rich world, and its take on a place that seemed oh-so-real - Japan in the mid-80s, specifically life in the unremarkable town of Yokosuka. So obsessed was I that when I first made it over to Japan some years later, the first thing I did was drag my partner to the location that inspired it all - a short hour's ride from Tokyo itself - and was impressed how Shenmue had captured the place.

The sequel went to Hong Kong, while the third game finds itself in rural China, out in Guilin. How faithful exactly is Shenmue 3's take on that world? British-Chinese journalist Lu-Hai Liang was born there at the very time the game takes place, so I was fascinated to get his take on how well Shenmue had captured his birthplace.

I didn't expect to like Shenmue 3. I'd been warned that the game is slow and creaky, and from images I'd glimpsed, the visuals looked like the graphical equivalent of North Korean fashion - simple and outdated. I never played the original Shenmue or its sequel, which came out in 1999 and 2001 in Japan, respectively, on the Sega Dreamcast. Back then I was watching my friend play through the four discs of Final Fantasy 8 on my PlayStation, dreaming of playing football for England, and wondering when the PlayStation 2 was going to come out, with its mythical Emotion Engine. Over the years, I'd heard of the awe and fondness this series evoked in the people who'd played it: the sense of atmospheric reality that Yu Suzuki, the creator of Shenmue, had conjured.

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At Digital Foundry we've talked about 'impossible ports' before - games like Doom 2016 and The Witcher 3 on Switch that seem to deny technological limitations and still bring the essence of the original experiences to a new audience. Shenmue 3 is something very different, but equally as unlikely. It's an impossible sequel, a game that shouldn't really exist owing to a whole host of reasons, but somehow here it is. It's a miracle that I'm now playing a modern sequel to a game that came out 18 years ago, a game that was - by all financial criteria - a major flop. Its sheer being is something to be treasured, but fundamentally, is it actually a good game and a worthy sequel? I'd say that the results are mixed. This is Shenmue viewed through a modern lens, which is absolutely fine. However, it's also a sequel produced very much as an indie production with limitations that impact the scope of the project, and by extension, how refined the game actually is.

A lot has changed since the original Shenmue was released. Its announcement and subsequent arrival on Dreamcast were quite an event - the culmination of everything Sega-AM2 had learned throughout its storied history. It was one of the most expensive games ever produced at time of its release - a truly lavish production built on a proprietary engine designed for cutting-edge console technology.

Almost two decades later, the world in which Shenmue 3 has released is a very different place indeed. With a presumably smaller budget and fewer resources, Ys Net has selected to utilise third party technology in the form of Unreal Engine 4 to produce the game for multiple, established platforms - a night and day shift from Shenmue's origins. From triple-A blockbuster with a ginormous budge to indie development, Shenmue has changed, Suzuki has changed - and today's games industry is a very, very different place.

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Against all odds, here it is. 18 years on from the last episode, and well after most had given up hope that Ryo Hazuki would ever find his way out of the Guilin cave where Shenmue 2 so abruptly ended, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Shenmue 3 is that it exists at all. Even more remarkable, then, that director Yu Suzuki - himself an absentee from the frontlines of games development for almost two decades - has delivered a worthy successor to what many consider an all-time great. Shenmue 3 takes the template of those age-old Dreamcast games and refines it in small, numerous ways - delivering a game that's both faithful and finessed.

What this is not, though, is a reimagining. This isn't the game to make a Shenmue devotee of the doubtful, and the curious circumstances behind Shenmue 3's development have made for a curious game; completely ignorant of modern trends in open world gaming, or indeed trends of the last 20 years, it's as if it has been developed in a sealed bubble, emerging as a relic of the past. It is archaic and arcane, as its predecessors often were, though it now no longer has the allure of being at the vanguard of video games. From being one of the medium's most expensive productions, Shenmue 3 is explicitly double-A; it's a straight-to-DVD follow-up to an old blockbuster.

Yet it still has that cinematic sweep, and manages to stay true to the aesthetic and ambience of the originals. Shenmue was one of the original open worlds, and you may well point to other open world games that came in its wake that have evolved almost beyond recognition since back then; Grand Theft Auto, which had its first 3D outing a month after the launch of Shenmue 2, or even Yakuza, the series formed from Shenmue's ashes. Shenmue exists in its own bubble, though. It always was, and always will be, its own thing; a softer, more stately thing that moves with the urgency of a 70s wuxia film and cares not for more modern action flourishes.

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The announcement of Shenmue 3 several years ago is one of those moments I never expected - something which seemed like an impossibility became reality. Over 18 years after the release of Shenmue 2, the story of Ryo Huzuki would continue on modern day hardware with PlayStation 4 and PC versions confirmed. The game is set for release on November 19th but a select tier of original Kickstarter backers received access to a playable demo earlier in the week. It's our first proper taste of the game - and I'm excited by what I've played.

Going into this one, there were bound to be concerns. The original Shenmue was one of the most expensive games ever made at the time of its release, developed by an industry-leading studio at the top of its game. By contrast, Shenmue 3 is crowd-funded, lower budget project put together by a much smaller team. How could it ever hope to compare?

For starters, I feel the power of modern middleware plays a large role - the flexibility of Unreal Engine 4 empowers developers to more efficiently build new experiences such as this in a way that wasn't possible 20 years ago. Many key features already exist within the engine itself, allowing the team to experiment and utilise these features more rapidly than in the past. However, it's the vision of what a new Shenmue game should be that I find most interesting. Yu Suzuki and his team have chosen to stick closely to the original design template rather than attempting to mimic modern open world design.

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Playing Shenmue 3's recently released demo is like coming across some strange relic, unearthed and polished off by curious digital archaeologists looking to understand turn of the century video games. The pace is stately to the point of being somnambulistic, its voice acting feels like it's been phoned in from half a planet and a couple of decades away, and the scope is limited in the extreme. I could not be any happier with it all.

I'm getting ahead of myself a little. The first thing that takes a while to comprehend is that Shenmue 3 exists, is playable, and is something I spent several happy hours playing over the weekend. The second thing that takes a short time to process is that, after all its various trials, Shenmue 3 actually might be good. As a fan who's been waiting eagerly, at times impatiently, for nearly 20 years, I am not disappointed in the slightest.

It's probably worth setting some context, though - I am most definitely a fan, a backer on Kickstarter and outside of that probably up to stalker-tier level when it comes to my support of Shenmue. I've made a pilgrimage to Yokosuka to see the setting of the original Shenmue, and have followed Yu Suzuki around the world to trace the project from its first seeds through to its eventual development.

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